New Deal : A. J. Vrana Audio Deal on Quill and Quire

Debut author A. J. Vrana brings her South Slavic heritage to bear in her duology, THE CHAOS CYCLE, described asLittle Red Riding Hoodmeets Hitchcock’sPsycho.Reclaiming the stark imagery of fairy tales, THE HOLLOW GODS is set in a small town haunted by an ominous figure said to lure young women into the forest and possess them.The myth is sustained by one troubling truth: women still go missing sometimes, and after they return, they always end up dead.The protagonists stumble upon each other as fact and folklore blur, and they try to untangle the mystery before another girl loses her life. 

Sold to Kim Budnick at Tantor Media, by Emmy Nordstrom Higdon at The Rights Factory (North American English).

New Deal: TRANSMUTATION by Alex DiFrancesco

Author of ALL CITY, Alex DiFrancesco's TRANSMUTATION will be published by Seven Stories Press in Fall 2021, edited by Dan Simon, agented by Nat Kimber.

TRANSMUTATION is a collection of short stories based on the author's scholarship of the original underpinnings of the Gothic genre and it's colonialism and attempts to demonize those outside it. The collection is a reclamation of monsters: trans vampires, WWII partisans in the French countryside carrying cultural monsters, a will-o-the-wisp that appears after the disappearance of a Black housekeeper in the Jim-Crow south. These stories take the outside and bring it inside, and reclaim domain over the roles those on the outside have been traditionally cast in.

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Brevity and more. Their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their novel All City (Seven Stories Press), were published in 2019. They are the recipient of grants and fellowships from PEN America and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. They can be found @DiFantastico on Twitter, or hanging out with the Sad Kids Superhero Collective in Cleveland.

New Agent Alert: Emmy Nordstrom Higdon

Emmy Nordstrom Higdon (they/them) has joined The Rights Factory as an Assistant Agent and has started building their own client list, focusing on character-driven #OwnVoices projects that are devastating to put down. They are a bookseller, a blogger at Books Beyond Binaries, a member of the planning team for the Festival of Literary Diversity, and are in the final stages of completing their PhD.